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Multicasting multimedia streams in IEEE 802.11 networks: a focus on reliability and rate adaptation

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Abstract

Multicasting multimedia streams in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs has two issues: reliability and rate adaptation. We address these issues by proposing two mechanisms that augment the current multicasting standards in a backward-compatible fashion. Semi-reliable multicasting (SRM) selects a leader who sends feedback information to lessen the reliability problem of multicast frames. Probing-based auto-rate fallback (PARF) allows the multicast source to adjust the bit rate depending on the link conditions of multicast recipients. Comprehensive simulation experiments reveal that SRM + PARF achieves reliability and link efficiency close to those of an omniscient multicasting framework.

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Notes

  1. The IEEE 802.11 standard defines a basic rate set (BRS), which is a minimum set of bit-rates which all stations in a WLAN cell can support to receive 802.11 control frames. Currently, most commercial AP products use one of BRS for multicast frames.

  2. In Sect. 5.1, how to utilize an unused field of a multicast frame header for this purpose is described, which is compliant with the legacy IEEE 802.11 standard.

  3. The MRT specifies the maximum allowed time before sending a responding report but is meaningful only in an IGMP Membership Query message sent by a multicast router. Thus, in IGMP Membership Report messages, the MRT is normally set to 0.

  4. To reduce IP multicast traffic, if a station was the last one to reply to a Membership Query with a Membership Report for the multicast group, it has to send a Leave Group message. Otherwise, it may not send any message since there must be other members on the subnet.

  5. We can utilize this high-cost periodic operation to check multicast recipients with poor wireless channel conditions.

  6. This is out of scope of this paper.

  7. Cross layer optimization is needed to maximize and optimize such high-level performance objectives, e.g., we can apply different transmission multicast rates to I, P, and B packets in layered multicasting coding. However, this paper focuses only on the MAC layer, so cross layer optimization is out of scope in this paper.

  8. In this simulation, nearly every frame loss is caused by collisions with unicasting flows.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD, Basic Research Promotion Fund) (KRF-2007-331-D00267).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

    Nakjung Choi, Yongho Seok, Taekyoung Kwon & Yanghee Choi

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  1. Nakjung Choi
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  2. Yongho Seok
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  3. Taekyoung Kwon
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  4. Yanghee Choi
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Correspondence to Taekyoung Kwon.

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Choi, N., Seok, Y., Kwon, T. et al. Multicasting multimedia streams in IEEE 802.11 networks: a focus on reliability and rate adaptation. Wireless Netw 17, 119–131 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-010-0268-9

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